American Horror Story: Cult featured a couple of flashbacks to infamous cult leaders, including pop artist Andy Warhol and Valerie Solanas, who not only tried to kill Warhol but also wrote a manifesto that plays a big role in Cult – but how much of Solana’s story in AHS: Cult was based on real life? For its seventh season, American Horror Story left supernatural elements behind to focus more on real-life horrors and social issues in Cult, set in 2017 in the aftermath of Donald Trump winning the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

American Horror Story: Cult took the audience to the fictional suburb of Brookfield Heights, Michigan, where Kai Anderson (Evan Peters) formed a cult that terrorized town residents, mostly Ally Mayfair-Richards (Sarah Paulson), a woman with many phobias that were triggered after Trump’s win. AHS: Cult had a couple of flashbacks to some infamous cult leaders through history, all of them played by Evan Peters, and among them was Andy Warhol, with the series addressing his attempted murder by Valerie Solanas, who is also portrayed as the founder of a radical cult – but that’s not entirely accurate.

The Real Valerie Solanas & SCUM Manifesto Explained

Valerie Solanas was a radical feminist and writer who had a very turbulent childhood, resulting in Solanas becoming violent and a rebel. While at the University of Maryland, Solanas hosted a call-in radio show where she advised listeners on how to combat men, and after dropping out of the University of Minnesota’s Graduate School of Psychology and attending Berkeley, she began working on the SCUM Manifesto.

Solanas met Warhol in 1967 outside The Factory (Warhol’s studio) and asked him to produce a play she wrote. Warhol read it but thought the script was so explicit that it must have been a police trap, and when Solanas called to ask about the script, he told her he lost it, but offered her to appear in one of his movies (I, a Man) as compensation. That same year, Solanas self-published the SCUM Manifesto, in which she argued that men had ruined the world and women had to fix it, suggesting that they overthrew society and eliminated the male sex (SCUM stands for “Society for Cutting Up Men”).

In 1968, believing Warhol was conspiring to steal her works, she entered The Factory and shot him three times, also shooting art critic Mario Amaya, and later that day, she turned herself in to the police. Solanas was diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia and was sentenced to three years in prison, with one year served, but after her release, she stalked Warhol, leading to another arrest and being institutionalized several times. Solanas died on April 25, 1988, at the age of 52.

Everything SCUM Was Responsible For In AHS: Cult Compared To Real Life

American Horror Story: Cult got Solana’s attempt to murder Andy Warhol right, but not the rest of her story. In Cult, Solanas was shown gathering a group of like-minded people with whom she shared her manifesto, and the attack on Warhol was the trigger for more attacks on men by SCUM, which by then was pretty much a cult. In the universe of American Horror Story, SCUM was responsible for the murders and attacks that were credited to the Zodiac Killer, with Bebe Babbitt explaining that there wasn’t a single Zodiac Killer. More couples were murdered by SCUM members directed by Solanas from prison, and when she was released, she stabbed a male member of SCUM she was sure was the one posing as the Zodiac Killer and sending letters to the newspapers, and ordered the rest of the members to kill him.

In real life, SCUM wasn’t a cult and Solanas was only guilty of shooting Warhol and Amaya, and she had nothing to do with the Zodiac Killer and his crimes. In the universe of American Horror Story, SCUM was still active in 2017, and in a final twist, Ally was revealed to be part of the cult, so Kai’s murder was yet another murder in SCUM’s already long list.